Hollywood is a Ghost Town and Everyone Knows it

A short take.

I won’t pretend to know exactly how Trump’s plan to impose 100% tariffs on movies made in other countries will work. But one thing I do know: it won’t matter whether it’s good for Hollywood or not. Their politics will demand they oppose it because of Trump.

I can hear the bloviating from a mile away. It’s bad enough that someone just openly called for Trump to be killed over it.

I think of that line by Hooper in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, “You got any better suggestions?” Well, do they? No. As with everything else, all they have is panic, fear, and outrage.

These are the same people who pretend that nothing is wrong with Hollywood lately, that movies aren’t dying, and that almost no one watches anything Hollywood puts out now because they can see the agenda coming from a mile away.

It used to be that movies had to be good because Hollywood listened to the free market. The people mattered because the box office mattered. What we’ve seen this past week with Ryan Coogler’s brilliant vampire movie, Sinners, is what movies used to do every week back in the 1990s and earlier, but not anymore.

I’m working on a separate piece about Sinners right now on Hollywood Woketopia, so I won’t say too much about it except that, as with Top Gun Maverick and Oppenheimer, it is a sign that audiences will turn out if the movie is good enough and word of mouth travels.

But without that box office return, without a profit model, production companies can’t afford to pay the unions. Imagine how expensive it is now to make a movie here with “intimacy coordinators” and insurance against a lawsuit, not to mention all of the other pressures to adhere to DEI standards. They can’t make movies that cost them more than they will make back.

There is no doubt this is a problem. It’s an “extinction-level event,” according to a producer cited in this story in the New York Times from just a few weeks ago:

In the past few years, as labor costs have grown after two strikes, producers of reality shows, scrappy indie movies, and blockbuster films have increasingly turned away from Los Angeles to filming locations overseas.

Those business decisions have considerable consequences for the industry’s thousands of middle-class workers: the camera operators, set decorators and lighting technicians who make movies and television happen. Frustration has reached a boiling point, according to more than two dozen people who make their living in the entertainment industry. They say that nothing short of Hollywood, as we know it, is at stake.

The story continues:

“This is an existential crisis — it’s an extinction event,” said Beau Flynn, a producer of big-budget movies like “San Andreas,” which despite being about an earthquake in California was filmed mostly in Australia. “These are real things. I am not a dramatist, even though I’m in the drama field.”

Productions have been filmed outside the United States for decades, but rarely has Hollywood work been so bustling overseas at a time when work in Hollywood itself has been so scant. Studios in European countries are bursting at the seams, industry workers say. And film and television production in Los Angeles is down by more than one-third over the past 10 years, according to FilmLA data.

The rest of the story paints a grim picture of Hollywood's future. And all of that before you even get to the fast-evolving technology of AI, which will soon replace many workers in various industries.

The solution, I believe, is to make better movies. The box office collapsed because Hollywood only made movies for people who read the Atlantic or graduate from Oberlin College. What a disaster that’s been for them and for us. We all should be invited to sit under the same roof and watch a story together as one audience and one people. That doesn’t happen anymore, and maybe it never will again.

At least Trump is trying to do something about the problem, as opposed to Hollywood’s approach, which is to put its head in the sand and not talk about the elephant in the room.

Hollywood is now fused with the Democrats. The same problems plague both of them. They’ve lost touch with the American people. They serve only the elites. They are living in a bubble. They can’t solve a problem they can’t even name. They have no leadership anywhere, not among the Democrats and not in Hollywood.

They need a DOGE to go in and fire everyone, then bring in all new talent that can write the best scripts, hire the best actors and actresses (hot men, sexy women), and try to revive the corpse. Will they? No.

Just as the line in Citizen Kane goes, “You’re going to need more than one lesson. And you’re going to get more than one lesson.” Speaking of great movies…

A Counter Culture is the Answer

One of America’s best writers, David Mamet, has a new movie coming out this week called Henry Johnson. But because Hollywood has exiled Mamet for voting for Trump, no production company would touch the movie. Instead, it is being released online and in one theater in Los Angeles.

I’ve seen and loved it, though it is a brain twister; you have to pay close attention to understand it. It is based on a play of the same name and is about how a weak mind can be manipulated. It’s all dialogue with strong performances by the entire cast.

When you’ve built an industry that no longer welcomes David Mamet, you know you are doing something very, very wrong. He isn’t the only one. The gulags are full of talent Hollywood won’t touch. It is their loss, and ours. They built their house of moral outrage and puritanism, and look where it has gotten them.

Like many Americans, I no longer look forward to movies or television shows now. Within the first five minutes, I know if they’re pushing an agenda or have cast it in such a way as to genuflect to the cult. I usually turn it off after ten minutes.

So I stick with the movies I desperately love, and I watch them over and over again to remind myself that yes, Hollywood did once make movies. That really did happen. I didn’t just dream it.

They made movies like No Country for Old Men:

Like Fargo:

Like Se7en:

And yes, Jaws.

I could go on. Even the worst movies from the past are better than almost anything we see now. Now, we wait for one movie like Sinners to come along and remind us that there is still such a thing as a great movie. They are too few and far between.

And yet, there is fertile ground for rebuilding anew. I have to believe that. Art will find a way. It is as essential to our species as breathing. Trump’s ideas are worth a shot. It can’t possibly get any worse.